College Union

A recent edition of Christian Education Journal, a publication of Talbot School of Theology, focused on College and Young Adult Ministry (Series 3, Volume 5, Issue 1, pages 11-27).  One of the articles in this journal was written by Dr. Chris Kiesling, professor of Christian Discipleship and Human Development at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY.  The article, “A Long Adolescence in a Lame Direction?  What should we make of the changing structure and meaning of young adulthood?” is featured here in a series of three articles. 

 

The first article in the series laid the foundation for understanding the changing nature of when a person “reaches” adulthood.  Kiesling identified societal factors and discussed their implications.  In the second article in the series, Kiesling focused on how Christian Education can tend the young adult life course.  Finally, this third and final article in the series will identify best practices for spiritual formation for young adults as well as wrap up with some conclusions. 

 

Dr. Kiesling’s article is posted here with permission of Christian Education Journal. For more information about the journal, go to:  http://wisdom.biola.edu/cej/issue/?i=70.

 

 

(Kiesling’s Article)

Shaping best practices for spiritual formation

         As the journey to adulthood becomes increasingly pluriform, one can expect unique and unpredictable ways that individuals encounter God. Discipleship curriculums that once relied on programmatic emphases, lesson plans, and/or unilateral exhortations offered from a distance are shifting from asserting religious truths to offering experiences of faith that actively engage young adults in putting faith into practice. Hirsch (2006) contends that action needs to be added to the educational equation and that the context in which ministry practice is learned is every bit as formational as the content. Indeed, involvement in a missional communitas, mission trips, urban immersion experiences, and summer work crews like YouthWorks, often become cornerstone events in the construction of young adult Christian identity. Intensive prayer vigils emboldened by transformative experiences at the International House of Prayer, contemplative retreats, and practices of solitude, Sabbath and fasting have structured means of deeper surrender, spiritual warfare, and attentiveness to movements of the Spirit. Worship movements like Passion are enabling fresh encounters with the Spirit and recovery ministries that embed twelve step practices in spiritual community are facilitating liberation from addictions. Richard Dunn (2001) profiles a template for shaping the lives of young adults by creating: a relational safe place, a meaningful learning place, an experiential worshipping place, an interpersonal prayer place, and a cultural impact place.

Yet, ministries are also recognizing that crucial moments in someone’s spiritual journey are most transformative when the “event” is preceded and succeeded by integrative formational processes. Alpha, for example, recognizes that conversion is made sustainable when the underlying world view that supports it is shared and incorporated across many weeks. Likewise, the impact of short term mission experiences is more sustainable when processed within a team willing to consider ethnocentric biases and lifestyle reorientation. Christian educator’s are finding Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning theory an especially salient pedagogy incorporating events of imbalance into processes of high reflexivity and perspective-taking. 

As curricular shifts promote development through heightened reflective processes, so must the role of the campus/young adult minister shift to accommodate to the fluidity of often disjointed adventures. Dunn (2001) characterizes the role of the minister with students as spiritual caregiver - first pacing with, and then leading students. The gifts and graces for ministry call for the capacity to listen attentively so truth can be shared from within a deeply personal context where trust is high and care is faithful. Listening and tending are imperative because the patterns toward adulthood may be varied. Osgood et. al. (2005) began a state wide study with twelve year olds in 1984 from which his team has now collected nine waves of data. Using a latent class analysis, they have identified six different ideal types of paths to adulthood: fast starters, parents without careers, educated partners, educated singles, working singles and slow starters. Similarly, Côté and Levine (2002) offer a typology characterizing different identity strategies young adults employ in either moving toward or evading adulthood:

Refusers – lack childhood structure; with a learned dependence often refuse adult responsibilities and remain with peers in perpetual adolescence

Drifters – possess more personal resources but may regard adult roles as conforming; often lack the skills to win favor in adult roles

Searchers – have unrealistic expectations for communities/mentors, dissatisfaction with themselves leads them to sabotage stability

Guardians – well-structured childhood enables engagement in adulthood, but this can turn rigid or neglectful of further growth

Resolvers – engage holistically in identity making, utilize reflexive appraisals of self to deepen competence in social and emotional intelligence            

These typologies, though abbreviated here, are important because they caution against overly simplistic generalizations of young adults. Prolonged journeys to full adulthood vary in motivation and predicted outcomes from “failure to launch” to personal explorations to advancing educational preparation. Stereotypes that label a generation as “stuck in adolescence,” or characterizations of parents as “helicopter”-ing over their college age children, can implicate a misguided response if the complexity of diagnosing a particular young adult journey is not carefully considered. Parenting, mentoring and spiritual caregiving requires careful and sustained discernment of the idiosyncratic attributions and decisions a young adult is making in constructing subjective meanings for their life narrative and in interpreting their competence in various social contexts. 

Re-symbolizing Christian meaning and identity               

Alan Hirsch (2006), in his challenging book, The Forgotten Ways, comments that “if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will” (p.111), and it may often do so by co-opting the language and symbols that previously bestowed powerful meaning and identity on generations of Christians. Marketing today is largely about managing a perception of value in such a way that a consumer becomes convinced that a product offers what religion does – identity, purpose, meaning, and community. Needed is a prophetic challenge to the control of consumerism, what Hirsch (2006) regards as the greatest threat to Christianity’s viability today. 

Several decades ago Klapp (1969) developed a theory of symbolism positing that with fluidity of change, social systems deprive people of psychological payback, the lack of which manifests as meaninglessness, alienation, and problems with identity. This shortness of meaning at a collective level motivates a mass groping for activities or symbols that restores identity. The term groping signifies what people do when they don’t know what is wrong, when it is unclear what they are searching for, and when having found it they may not know what they are seizing. When the symbols that have bestowed meaning to a life are disturbed, so is the person disturbed; witness the ego screaming (Klapp, 1969) inherent in contemporary fads of tattooing, fashion makeovers, style rebellion, and ornamentation.  In mass society, even under success, people may ask what meaning goods and luxuries hold for me.

In Klapp’s (1969) theory, identity is a symbolic matter. One is forever attempting to create and hunt for symbols which give meaning to the self, often with the help of others. Society fails to supply adequate identity when symbols are disturbed to the extent that they no longer provide reliable referent points by which people can locate themselves socially, realize themselves sentimentally, or declare to others or themselves who they are. Writing decades ago, Klapp recognized that symbolic catastrophes were happening everywhere and that meaning symbols once destroyed were not easy to rebuild. Intriguingly, Klapp felt that technology may serve to may wipe out symbols more than it replaces them. Indeed, the deconstruction implicit in postmodernity yields a symbolic deprivation of images that once served as landmarks for the Christian faith journey. Just as 9/11 desecrated the skyline of New York City and now requires the rebuilding of structures to incorporate that traumatic history into new referential meanings, so too must the symbols that once constituted and bestowed Christian identity, now compromised by scandal, colonialism, patriarchy, manifest destiny, and consumerism become re-endowed with new symbolic meaning.

A few years ago at Asbury Seminary, our annual Kingdom Conference focused on creation care, noting how all of creation groans together with us for full redemption (Romans 8:18-30). We confessed lifestyle patterns that abuse others and creation and sought a better stewardship of the natural resources God has entrusted. In preparing for Friday’s communion service, I was struck by the acts of consumption that frame the Biblical narrative - Eve and Adam taking the fruit and eating, juxtaposed with Jesus taking and eating at the last supper. One act of consumption sends all of humanity into enmity; while the other redeems and reconciles.  Recognizing the significance of a single act of consumption, we entered communion that day asking ourselves what our patterns of consumption effect and what they require of the world we inhabit and of the people who produce the products we consume. I garnered further insight from Andy Crouch’s (2003) summary of an article by Fr. Mark Broski. Broski taught that the practice of the eucharist offers a truer way to consume. Where capitalism urges that the more costly something is, the more value it contains; we receive communion in simple elements. We take a piece of bread, scarcely enough to nourish our bodies, and with it claim this is the “Bread of life” (John 6:35). In the world’s economy, where one sits and who one sits beside, is based on social standing; the rich get front row seats, the table of honor, and the five course dinner (Crouch, 2003). At the Lord’s table, we gather as one and we share a common loaf. As noted by the apostle Paul, consumption without sensitivity to social justice is unthinkable. Where the economic enterprise is compelled by competition, operating best with multiple options to choose from; the eucharist offers no lengthy menu to read, no novelty, no list of options to order according to preference (Crouch, 2003). Instead there is the profound simplicity of the Lord of the Universe inviting - “here is my body and my blood – come and eat together as daughters and sons of God.”  

Conclusion

Sociological analysis reveals that in the Post World War II era, the fairly predictable transition that most adolescents historically took to adulthood has been radically altered. Young adults today encounter multiple possibilities of being, with few conceptual itineraries in place to mark the trail and provide reassurance. A wide variety of pathways to adulthood have emerged, making ministry difficult with a group that is no longer homogenous, and who do not transition as a cohort through predictable marital or family statuses. The requisite task of identity-making through multiple choices, can be exhilarating for those with material and psychological resources. For others, however, it may simultaneously create anxiety, stagnation, and/or multiphrenia - the splitting of the self into a complex multiplicity of investments (Gergen, 1991). Gergen (1991) contends that this contemporary saturation of technology results in an overpopulated self, compelled to absorb myriad divergent voices on a daily bases. Discipleship in such a context entails: (a) teaching people to discern which voices hold truth about themselves, (b) helping them to evaluate what is unwittingly being given authority in their lives, and (c) offering them practices that produce freedom from the compulsive use of technology (e.g. Sabbath keeping, abstaining from cell phone and laptop use, solitude, silent retreats). 

              Sociologists predict increased difficulties with social integration and personal meaning (Côté and Levine, 2002). In such a context, the church has a great stake in how personhood is regarded, how vocational ideals are shaped, what symbolic images confer life’s meaning, and the ways in which identity formation is being restructured in the lives of young adults today. In this article I have proposed several ways, theologically and formationally, the church may be poised to address these challenges. 

 

                                    References

 

Arnett, J. (2006). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens to the twenties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Baumeister, R.F. and Muraven, M. (1996). Identity as adaptation to social, cultural, and historical context. Journal of Adolescence, 19, 405-416.

 

Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society. Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.    

 

Blevins, D. (2005). The practicing self: A theory of personhood. The Asbury Theological Journal. 60, 9-22.

 

Commision on Children at Risk (2003). Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities. New York: Institute for American Values. 

 

Côté, J. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of maturity and identity. New York: New York University Press.

 

Côté, J. & Levine, C. (2002). Identity formation, agency, and culture: A social psychological synthesis. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

 

Crouch, A. (2003). Life after postmodernity. In Leonard Sweet (Ed.) The Church in emerging culture:Five perspectives. (pp. 63-100) Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

 

Dongell, J. (2007). How bad is it, Doc? Sermon for Holiness emphasis week at Asbury Seminary, September 17, 2007. 

 

Dunn, R, R, (2001). Shaping the spiritual life of students: A guide for youth workers, pastors, teachers and campus ministers. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press. 

 

Erikson, E.  H.  (1963).  Childhood and society (2nd ed.).  New York: Norton.

 

Erikson, E. H. (1968).  Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: Norton.

 

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Hirsch, A. (2006). The forgotten ways: Reactivating the missional church. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.

 

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Kinlaw, D. (2005). (Informal conversations during a semester of round table talks called “Trinity on the Hill.”). Dr. Kinlaw’s formal presentation may be purchased from The Francis Asbury Society. 

 

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Osgood, D.W., Ruth, G., Eccles, J.S., Jacobs, J.E., and Barber, B.L. (2005). In Setterstien, R.A., Furstenberg, F.F., and Rumbaut, R.G  (Eds.) On the frontier of adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy (pp. 320-355). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   

 

Pohl, C.D. (forthcoming in 2008). Practices that make and break community (tentative title), Wm. B. Eerdmans.

 

Roehlkepartian, E.C., Benson, P.L., King, P.E. and Wagener, L.M. (2006). Spiritual development in childhood and adolescence: Moving to the scientific mainstream. In Roehlkepartain, E.C., King, P.E., Wagener, L.M., & Benson, P.L. (Eds.) The handbook of spiritual development in childhood and adolescence (pp. 1-15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 

Schweitzer, F. (2004). The postmodern lifecycle: Challenges to church and theology. St. Louis: Chalice Press:

 

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Chris Kiesling (Ph.D., Texas Tech University)

serves as professor of Human Development and Christian Discipleship at Asbury Theological Seminary, in Wilmore, KY.

Categories: Nurturing the Soul of the College Student, Spiritual Formation
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